1. Field of the Invention
This is a continuation-in-part (CIP) application claiming the benefit of my prior application cited above. This invention relates to disposable biodegradable insulation sleeves for drinking cups, specifically insulating sleeves that nest or wrap around disposable beverage cups that can also stabilize the cup when needed.
2. Prior Art
There are thousands of beverage shops in the United States and thousands more in other countries. One coffee outlet alone has more than 14,000 coffee shops in the U.S. and more abroad. The “National Coffee Trends Association” reports that “54% of the adult population drink coffee everyday representing over 110 million daily coffee drinkers. Of these, 20 million drink gourmet coffee beverages every day. Coffee drinkers consume on an average 3.1 cups per day”. Most of these coffee drinkers get their coffee from coffee shops that serve them in disposable single walled paper cups. Insulation sleeves are usually provided to nest or wrap around these cups in order to primarily prevent the hands from being burned by the extreme heat of the coffee. Double or triple walled cups are also becoming more popular. These multiple walled cups use an insulation sleeve permanently attached to the outside wall or a middle insulating layer, eliminating the need for sleeves. All these disposable cups are top-heavy and hence unstable because their diameter increases from bottom to top.
The disposable cups are top heavy because, as stated, they are wide on top with a narrow bottom. They are tapered from a larger upper open end to a smaller lower closed end so that they are easy to handle; the pull of gravity and their wider top part prevents them from falling through the grasping hand without undue effort. They are also made that way so that they can be nested for better storage and inexpensive shipping purposes. However, a slight bump can easily knock over an upright beverage cup. But when a cup is inverted, so that the wide top is now on the bottom, it is difficult to knock over.
There are devices that take advantage of the stable attribute of the inverted cup while also providing insulation. U.S. Pat. No. 6,562,270 to Gannon et al', May 13, 2003, shows a cup whose upper part is sliced from its lower portion at about its mid-section, which is discarded. The upper portion is retained for use as a insulator sleeve for a beverage cup and stabilizes it when inverted. The same goes for the cup of U.S. Pat. No. 5,143,247 to Gavle, Sep. 1, 1992, which uses a plurality of frangible recesses positioned horizontally and circumferentially around the device, allowing it to be adapted to a variety of container sizes. U.S. Pat. Pub. Appn. No. 2005/0184074, to Simmons et al', Aug. 25, 2005, uses a cup-like sleeve that is inverted to take advantage of the outwardly rolled rim of the sleeve's larger top end which is inserted into a U-shaped device glued to a surface in order to hold the sleeve in place. This sleeve has slits cut along its upper edge that open up to accommodate the larger upper half of a cup that is inserted to be stabilized on a surface or to be stacked vertically.
Most disposable beverage cups are not insulated. There are cups that are insulated, but they are not as ubiquitous. Instead, sleeves are provided separately by coffee shops, to primarily protect the drinker's hands from the extreme heat of the coffee and secondarily to keep it from losing heat. The insulation sleeves and the cups are generally similar in shape: both are made from blank arcuate paperboard blanks having a convex outer edge and a concave inner edge. When assembled they are frustoconic in shape. The cups have closed bottoms while the insulation sleeves are open at both ends and are made of insulating fiberboards designed to insulate the beverage cup by nesting or wrapping generally around its mid-section. When insulation sleeves are not available, a second cup is used instead: this practice is called “double cupping.”
The most popular insulating arrangement is the insulation sleeve that is dispensed by almost all of the coffee houses for insulating the beverage cup, but the top-heavy beverage cups can still easily be tipped over in use and handling.
Numerous insulation sleeves are known and differ mostly by the kind of paperboard insulation material they employ and in how they are assembled. Examples of these insulation sleeves are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,286,754 to Stier et al., Sep. 11, 2001; U.S. Pat. No. 5,205,473 to Coffin, Sr., Apr. 27, 1993; U.S. Pat. No. 5,425,497 to Sorensen, Jun. 20, 1995; U.S. Pat. No. 5,842,633 to Nurse, Dec. 1, 1998, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,826,786, to Dickert, Oct. 27, 1998. Most of these insulation sleeves are now used commercially, such as Coffin's which is used primarily by Starbucks and Sorensen's which is used primarily as Java Jacket. U.S. Pat. No. 6,986,438 to Leung, Jan. 17, 2006, shows an insulating cup sleeve made from a flat annular elongated blank with straight top and bottom edges and end edges. This differs from the flat, generally arcuate unitary paperboard blank shown in the aforementioned patents. Leung also has a plurality of transverse slits situated along the upward edge of the sleeve in order to accommodate cups of varying sizes.
Insulated cups are available in either Styrofoam or with double or triple walls, which are becoming more popular, such as U.S. Pat. No. 6,422,456 (Jul. 23, 2002) to Sadlier and assigned to Insulair, Inc. These multiple walled cups use an insulation sleeve permanently attached to the outside wall or a middle insulating layer, eliminating the need for sleeves. In fact the Insulair cup is advertised as the “cup with the built-in sleeve.” However, they still easily tip over.